Late German Research Articles

Capturing dissent: forensic photography of graffiti in the late German Democratic Republic

ABSTRACT Through a document analysis of archival materials, this paper explores visual landscapes of graffiti, produced by the German Democratic Republic’s Ministry for State Security (MfS) photographers in Leipzig from 1980 to 1989. Capturing visual dissent through forensic photography and its subsequent displacement from public view are two entwined territorial practices that appear to concern aesthetics yet are inherently political. Four selected photographs illustrate the main findings: First, a logic of invisibilisation as a means of deterritorialisation, and second, contradictions in MfS photo practices that highlight the contingent character of repairs to the brittle architecture of state sovereignty in the late GDR.

Sociable individualism: Christian Jakob Kraus and the Königsberg Enlightenment

ABSTRACT Christian Jakob Kraus (1753–1807), political economist and Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Königsberg, has long been neglected by historians, dismissed as a translator, a teacher, and a derivative disciple of Adam Smith. This article posits sociability as a useful category for understanding Kraus’s life, thought, and legacy. It aims to thereby reposition him as a meaningful figure in the late German Enlightenment. First, Kraus is presented as a natural Einsiedler who, surrounded by the commercially vibrant Königsberg, comes to champion a methodology foregrounding praxis, lived experience, and the application of ideas for communal benefit. This ‘sociable’ approach to knowledge is contextualised within broader critiques of scholarly esotericism across Germany. Second, his work is treated as a case study elucidating the interdependence of individualism and sociability in the wider European Enlightenment. I argue that Kraus expressed a ‘sociable individualism,’ drawing upon Smith and Immanuel Kant, which harmonised autonomy and community.

«Мечтательность» в немецком просвещении: основные вехи развития

The article concerns the origin and development of the concept of "enthusiasm" in German philosophy, starting from the Reformation and ending with the philosophy of I. Kant. This concept is key to the philosophy and theology of the German Enlightenment. At the moment, the philosophical and even more theological thought of the Enlightenment in Germany is studied very little. At the same time, new studies of this period have appeared abroad in the last few decades. For the most part, these studies are aimed at identifying the key ideas of the German Enlightenment and clarifying the formation and development of some of them. “Enthusiasm” refers to one of the significant polemical ideas of this period, however, both in Russia and abroad, it has not been sufficiently studied. The article discusses the original meaning of this concept in the theology of Luther, who understood enthusiasm in the expanded meaning of any deviation from his own version of the Christian faith. Then, enthusiasm began to be understood more narrowly and associated with the predominance of attention to the inner sphere of religious experiences and the resulting neglect of the sphere of external religious practices. This understanding became more and more stronger over time and led to the fact that this concept began to be used to refer to religious movements of a mystical and quasi-mystical persuasion. Eventually, during the late German Enlightenment (second half of the 18th century), enthusiasm became practically synonymous with defining the trends of late radical pietism. Such an understanding of enthusiasm, in turn, finds its foundation in pietism itself, going back to the criticism of P. J. Spener, the founder of classical pietism, against the representatives of radical pietism. We also find a certain influence of this tradition of understanding reverie in Kant, who divides it into two types - religious and moral enthusiasm.

Seeing Things Anew: Hoffmann’s Don Juan: A Fabulous Incident Which Befell a Travelling Enthusiast and Gogol’s The Portrait

Established criticism argues that the influence of the German fantastic stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) on Nikolai Gogol’s Russian supernatural tales was short-lived. This article disagrees. Gogol (1809-1852) achieved literary success in the late 1830s, when the future course of Russian literature was strongly indebted to late German Romantic literary concepts. We trace the relationship of Hoffmann’s short story Don Juan: a Fabulous Incident which Befell a Travelling Enthusiast with the early and late versions of Gogol’s short story The Portrait, showing that Hoffmannesque elements are stronger in the later publication. Our close analysis uses two critical theories: Shlovsky’s concept of defamiliarisation, or ostranienie (Note 1), and Todorov’s theories of the fantastic, the one being apposite on account of its Russian perspective, and the other because of its insights into Gothic literature. We also support our argument by historical and biographical evidence, with the overarching aim of bringing new critical perspectives to the study of the short fiction of Hoffmann and Gogol.

A Wunderblume and Her Friends: How Bettina Brentano-von Arnim Develops Individuality Through Dialogue

AbstractBettina Brentano-von Arnim (1785–1859) is one of the most fascinating writers of German Romanticism. After a late, but spectacular start to her career as an author with the biographically inspired Goethe's Correspondence with a Child (1835) that boldly claims the legacy of Germany's most admired poet, Bettina continues to explore the realm of biography, but also widens her perspective to the pressing social questions of her time. Her message is entertaining, yet clear: we need a new way of thinking that engages the whole human being who understands and accepts her rational as well as sensible side, who is situated in a society and engages in dialogue with others. Accordingly, her work is an apt example of the practice of symphilosophy in late German Romanticism. This paper will concentrate on the notion of self-formation through dialogue in her letter books, and the political-aesthetic idea of a ‘king for the people’ that guided Brentano-von Arnim's political engagement in the 1840s.

Fünf Thesenpapiere von Falk Wagner

Abstract Falk Wagner (1939–1998) was the leading Hegelian in late 20th century German Protestant theology. Wagner who had studied philosophy with Theodor W. Adorno and Wolfgang Cramer in Frankfurt am Main and Systematic Theology with Wolfhart Pannenberg at the University of Mainz taught Systematic Theology at the Universities of Munich and, since 1988, Vienna. He published several influential books. In his lectures and seminars he frequently handed out short theory papers to his students which should serve as the basis for debate. The five texts presented here for the first time deal with the problems of individual in society and of the modern history of theology, with the doctrine of God (creator and trinity), with the significance of the Bible for the systematic theology and finally with the concept of „Subjektivität“ in G. W. F. Hegel’s philosophy. These texts are an essential source for the development of Wagner’s thought when teaching at the university of Munich until 1988.

‘Truth’, technology and transmedial theatre in Europe

Recent scholarship has expanded upon the concept of populism as performance to include a focus on how it employs digital technologies. However, what happens when theatrical performances appropriate far-right populist discourse to potentially parody how it frames its nationalist rhetoric as an appeal to ‘the people’? How do the relationships between performers and spectator-participants in such artistic works differ from those forged through the public manifestations of populist politics? How have artists who engage with populism employed technology to increase the reach and interactivity of their performances, and how does this engagement seek to undermine, and/or generate a troubling ‘belief’ in, the supposed ‘reality’ of such projects? This article critically reassesses the transmedial theatre of the late German artist Christoph Schlingensief and the Tallinn-based theatre company, Theatre NO99, in relation to current understandings of populism within an increasingly digitized, post-truth society. Schlingensief and NO99 might be seen to employ strategies of ‘subversive affirmation’ and ‘over-identification’ in their aims to resist the rise of far-right populism. Yet, we argue that these approaches can be dangerous: artists can reinforce far-right populist agendas if audiences fail to self-reflexively decode and reject subtle yet effective forms of mass manipulation – which is more likely when the components of such projects are dispersed across multiple media platforms through which counterfactual information also increasingly circulates.

Home Is Where the Heart Is: The Rise of Emotional Spaces in the German Late Enlightenment

The emergent political arena of the late eighteenth century, and the literary one that preceded it, were claimed to be based upon a functional dichotomy between a private sphere of emotive ties and associations, and a “public sphere” of rational criticism (Habermas, 1962). This categorical distinction, however, scantily registered the emergence of a corollary affective economy in this period, which redefined social, political, and physical spaces according to their emotional content, or lack thereof. This article focuses on the rise of emotional language, its spatial configurations, and its dissemination during the late German Enlightenment in three thematic contexts: the “popular Enlightenment” (Volksaufklärung) and its emphasis on the enhancement of literacy among the lower classes to achieve emotional refinement; the visual representation of domestic emotional scenarios in the context of the Franco-German cultural exchange surrounding the French Revolution; and the emergence of “homeland” (Heimat) as an increasingly ubiquitous emotion-bound metaphor in the nationalization of space toward the century's end. These contexts reveal major shifts in the cultural dynamics of space and emotion in this period: first, the reaffirmation of emotion as a culturally viable interpretive mode, set against earlier concerted attempts to suppress or control it; second, the osmosis between private and public that enabled emotional protocols to transgress supposedly natural boundaries of class, status, and gender across society, and establish new contacts between exclusive and excluded communities; and last, the article shows how the spatial imaginary that emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century—despite its reliance on older dispositions regarding space in German culture—deployed emotional vocabularies for engendering new forms of sociability, which went on to became central determinants of Germanness in the early nineteenth century.

Sergey Nikitovich Savinsky (1924-2021) and the Historical Self-Awareness of Evangelical Christians-Baptists

The article presents biographical information about the first confessional historian of Russian Evangelical Christians-Baptists, S. N. Savinsky. He authored a number of chapters on the Russian-Ukrainian Evangelical-Baptist community in a book titled “History of Evangelical Christians-Baptists in the USSR” (1989), until that time the only book on the history of his own denomination published during Soviet times. Described is his work as member of the Historical Commission of the All-Union Council of the Evangelical Christians-Baptists. The article traces four trajectories of the worldwide evangelical revival into Russia: the late German Pietism, the North America revival movement, the influence of the worldwide Evangelical Alliance, and the early German Pietism. S. N. Savinsky basic concepts of evangelical revival and uniqueness of the Russian Evangelical-Baptist community are analyzed.

Ungewöhnliche Perspektiven auf Juden in der deutschen und italienischen Literatur des Spätmittelalters

Abstract We always face a certain danger when we investigate cultural-historical situations or conditions. Our chronicles and other documents tend to emphasize dramatic, if not tragic cases that color our understanding in rather dark light. This also applies to the relationship between Jews and Christians during the late Middle Ages, which has been discussed already from many different perspectives. Less consulted have been late German medieval verse narratives (verse-couplets, or mæren), where we encounter a number of times quite remarkable frameworks which situate the Jews in a much more mundane, ordinary context. As much as the poets endeavored, of course, to present the possibility of converting Jews to Christianity, as much they thereby also reveal a variety of different relationships characterized by a surprising degree of normalcy, free from the usual anti-Judaic hostility. We gain additional support for our approach by way of including two prose novellas by Boccaccio in his Decameron (ca. 1350).

Between imitation and thematization of music: towards an intermedial utopia in late German modernist literature

Between imitation and thematization of music: towards an intermedial utopia in late German modernist literature

The Contemporary Russian Cinema Reader: 2005–2016 by Rimgaila Salys (review)

REVIEWS 771 (and Dhooge in particular) brings into focus the need for a new edition of Nabokov’s lectures, especially if such serious scholarship on the lectures is going to continue. Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages and Meghan Vicks Literatures, University of Colorado, Boulder Salys, Rimgaila (ed.). The Contemporary Russian Cinema Reader: 2005–2016. Film and Media Studies. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2019. 402 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $29.95 (paperback). In the midst of teaching a rather generic history class at McGill University some years ago, class discussion moved to issues related to national mythmaking, invented history, the creation of national heroes, and the like. Rather unimaginative topics even then, though in the wake of the 1995 independence referendum in Quebec, they all seemed to have both more urgency and relevance. More than a few students, when questioned by their instructor, while insisting Canada had ‘no heroes’, also noted to me if they were forced to choose, and Pierre Trudeau was after all too clichéd a choice, then Paul Henderson would suffice. Who? Henderson was the hockey player who led Team Canada to victory over the Soviet Union in the ‘Summit Series’ in 1972. This was not only, it seems, a foundational moment in modern Canadian nationalism. For many Soviet citizens it represented a time when they strode across the global stage, globalization before the term became superfluous. Legend No. 17 (released in 2013), one of the most popular Russian films in recent decades, is a biopic representing the life of the late Valerii Kharlamov, a star of that Canadian-Soviet contest. It is also a film that, for whatever its flaws, has proven to be especially popular among my students. It is also the subject of Greg Dolgopolov’s discerning chapter in Rimgaila Salys’s uneven, but ultimately rewarding, edited book under review. Legend No. 17, especially its celebration of the Soviet victory in game one in Montreal was, according to the film’s producer Leonid Vereshchagin, something that might ‘unite’ all generations in a collective outpouring of pride ‘for our country’; indeed he compared it to ‘Gagarin’s flight, this victory’ (p. 272). The editor’s parameters for this collection are that it ‘seeks to provide undergraduate students [in Russian cinema and culture courses] with an introduction to significant Russian films that are available with English subtitles’ (p. 7). Salys’s volume comprises chapters on seventeen ‘Russian’ films made over the past fifteen years. There are additional chapters further elucidating some of the seventeen films or their directors. There are little obvious motifs that link the films, except that they might be labelled as Russian SEER, 98, 4, OCTOBER 2020 772 (whatever that might mean in the ‘globalized’ world perpetually signified by Vlad Sturkov in his introduction), and that they were released after 2005. More on allusive common themes later. Some of the chapters address films that are now well-trodden artifacts in contemporary film literature. These writings include informed and detailed synopses of the films, and offer perceptive discussions of their historical and production contexts. This is, of course, essential in a text ostensibly aimed at the uninitiated. The more instructive chapters are richly dialogic, enveloping the reader in a post-Soviet Russian cinematic culture that is both part of a perceived global film industry and frustratingly, to some, bound to the Soviet past. These include chapters on the late Aleksei Balabanov’s Dead Man’s Bluff (2005), by Aleksandr Prokhorov; and Cargo 200 (2007), by Anthony Anemone; Salys’s on Valerii Todorovskii’s Hipters (2008); and Sergei Loznitsa’s My Joy (2010), written by Justin Wilmes. Andrei Zviagintsev is the most celebrated, at least internationally, post-Soviet Russian director, and two of his films are treated here: Elena (2011), written by Elena Prokhorova, and Leviathan (2014) by Julian Graffy. Tatiana Mikhailova’s contribution is a fascinating piece on Silent Souls (2010), directed by Aleksei Fedorchenko. Hard to Be a God (2013), by the late Aleksei German, is the subject of chapters by Anton Dolin and Elena Stishova. Directors such as the late Balabanov, Loznitsa, Zviagintsev and the late German, are fixtures in the rapidly expanding literature on modern Russian film. The attention given...

The art of teaching against the grain: a tribute to Thomas Elsaesser’s media-archaeological methods

ABSTRACT This essay offers insights to late German film historian Thomas Elsaesser’s pioneering teaching methods in the field of media archaeology at the beginning of the 21st century. It looks into Elsaesser’s original approach of teaching cinema history at the University of Amsterdam and discusses some of his key conceptual and educational tools such as the epistemic 1900–2000 juxtaposition, the hermeneutics of astonishment, and the S/M dispositifs of non-theatrical cinema. Different from the materialist-machinic method proposed by new media scholars, Elsaesser’s media-archaeological approach takes its cue from early cinema studies that serve as a concrete example of going ‘against the grain’ of traditional film historiography, dismantling its various tales of progress, or false teleologies. Later in his career, Elsaesser would think of media archaeology as a symptom of the various crises in the field of film studies with respect to the notions of progress, narration, and representation. The essay also discusses some of Elsaesser’s more experimental and playful teaching projects, involving locative media, GPS technology, and HyperCard interface design. The overall aim is to pay tribute to Elsaesser’s important role in establishing media archaeology as an academic discipline.

The Six Faces of Beauty. Baumgarten on the Perfections of Knowledge in the Context of the German Enlightenment

AbstractIn this essay, I investigate Baumgarten’s doctrine of the six perfections of knowledge (wealth, magnitude, truth, clarity, certainty, and life), which is famously one of the most characteristic and enigmatic features of his philosophy. Recent scholarship has almost unanimously stressed the rhetorical background of the categories. Instead, I argue that Baumgarten elaborates his theory in close relationship with coeval philosophy. To support this claim, I examine the position of some Thomasian philosophers, such as Johann Liborius Zimmermann, who had indicated a list of criteria similar to that of Baumgarten. Moreover, I analyse the distinction between formal and material perfections, tracing it back to the Wolffian milieu. On these bases, I propose a new reconstruction of Baumgarten’s doctrine, with particular attention to its aesthetic application. Finally, I outline the reception of the six categories in the late German Enlightenment until Kant.

Ulrich Beck: E-Special Introduction

This e-special issue of Theory, Culture & Society showcases work published in the journal by and about the late German sociologist Ulrich Beck (1944–2015). Beck became known as a pioneering and inventive thinker, continuously engaged in a quest to capture the essence of the modern age, whilst simultaneously wrestling with the upcoming horizons of the future. During his career, he was responsible for developing some of the defining sociological concepts of the late 20th and early 21st century, including risk, reflexive modernization, individualization and cosmopolitanism. He published many articles in Theory, Culture & Society, inspiring acolytes to mobilize his ideas and provoking critics to dispute them. Complementing articles written by Beck, this collection also includes critical commentaries, applications of his work, a selection of interviews and several reflective pieces which consider his legacy. The key aspiration of this special issue is to encourage contemplation on both the richness and the range of Ulrich Beck’s academic contribution. The contents stimulate reflection on the intricacies of Beck’s method of inquiry and flag up ways in which his work can influence the future trajectory of social theory.

Democratizing Abolitionism: Anti-slavery Discourses and Sentiments in August von Kotzebue's Die Negersklaven (1796)

Despite their peripheral position in the Atlantic slave trade, authors of the late eighteenth-century German states composed a number of dramas that addressed imperialism and slavery. As Sigrid G. Köhler has argued (2018), these authors aimed to exert political leverage by grounding their plays in the international abolitionist debate. This article explores how a body of intellectual texts resonated in August von Kotzebue's bourgeois melodrama Die Negersklaven (1796). In a sentimental preface, he mentions diverse philosophical, historical and political sources that contributed to the dramatic plot and guaranteed his veracity. Looking specifically at the famous Histoire des deux Indes (1770) by Denis Diderot and Guillaume-Thomas F. Raynal, I will examine the ways in which Kotzebue adapted highbrow abolitionist discourses to the stage in order to convery an anti-slavery ideology to the white European middle classes. Kotzebue seems to ground abolitionism in the bourgeois realm by moulding political texts into specific generic templates such as an elaborate mise-en-scène, the separation and reunion of lost lovers, a fraternal conflict, and the representation of suffering victims and a compassionate white hero.

Anonymity and Ideology: When Defenders of Church and State Opt for Anonymity

ABSTRACTSimple reasons of self-protection and self-preservation have often compelled authors to conceal their authorship in the case of texts that subject religious or civil authorities to criticism and ridicule. A more perplexing form of literary anonymity arose, however, among many late eighteenth-century German writers who were committed to a defence of these authorities. This article considers the motives that induced such proto-conservative writers to publish anonymously by examining their tendency to conceive of public opinion as a force that in its own way came to seem anonymous and even decidedly sinister.

Shipping Fools: Foucault’s Wandering Madman and Civic Responsibility in Late Medieval Germany

Abstract Few aspects of Michel Foucault’s seminal study The History of Madness have been more widely derided and debunked than Foucault’s assertion that medieval mad persons sailed the rivers of Europe as a kind of real-world counterpart to the literary and artistic trope of the ship of fools. But while Foucault was not correct in many of his assumptions, he also was not entirely wrong to draw attention to the river. Based on archival research in Nuremberg, Munich, and Frankfurt, this article offers a critical insight into how some medieval cities managed their problematic mad. In particular, it uncovers the widespread and little-understood practice of expelling the mad from late medieval German towns. It argues that the practice of expulsion was multilayered, ranging from relatively benign trips to convey a mad person back home, to official banishments of criminal mad men and women. It finds that most of the expelled mad, however, were simply sent away, out of the city walls and away from municipal responsibility. These expulsions appear frequently in fifteenth-century records and reveal that one particular kind of route was preferred by cities in Southern Germany: the river. In fact, municipal leaders routinely used the Danube, the Isar, and the Main rivers as the best way to rid their towns of difficult or friendless mad persons. While such river journeys did not take place on “ships of fools,” the river was thus a critical and meaningful part of the geographic and cultural landscapes of madness.

The Ulli Beier Archives at the Centre for Black Culture and International Understanding (CBCIU), Nigeria, and a Summary of Holdings

AbstractThe Centre for Black Culture and International Understanding (CBCIU) was established on 7 January 2009. Located behind the Osun State Secretariat, southwest Nigeria, the CBCIU prides itself on being the inheritor of the archival estate of Ulli Beier, the late German connoisseur and African culture enthusiast. Housed in its Archive and Documentation Room/Unit, this repository contains very rich archival materials that include over 700 photographs with carefully preserved negatives and slides all dating back to the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, and thousands of works of literature published between 1921 and the 2000s on virtually all aspects of Yoruba art, culture, philosophy and intellectual history. Based on fieldwork conducted at the CBCIU in 2018 and 2019, this study embarks on three mutually-connected transactions. First, it examines Ulli Beier's ‘cultural border-crossings’ into Yorubaland, particularly in Osogbo, southwest Nigeria, where his diverse cultural interactions facilitated the revival of a diminishing culture. Second, the study discusses the genesis of the CBCIU dating back to Ulli Beier's emergence in Nigeria in 1950. Third, it analyses what it means for the CBCIU to inherit an invaluable material legacy. This is done by giving an account of the inventories and a summary of the holdings in the Archives. While the Archive forms the very nucleus of what the CBCIU stands for, I argue that this agency serves as a worthy inheritor of a material legacy that continually seeks cultural relevance and perpetuity.

The voice of a popular German Capuchin preacher: The Weeg-Weiser gen Himmel (1668-1679) of Geminianus von Mainz

The voice of a popular German Capuchin preacher:The Weeg-Weiser gen Himmel (1668-1679) of Geminianus von Mainz Bert Roest (bio) This essay wants to provide a preliminary introduction to, and initial contextualization of the sermons of the seventeenth-century Capuchin preacher Geminianus von Mainz (Geminianus Monacensis, ca. 1606-1672). To my knowledge, his literary production has never been a subject of exhaustive scholarship, even though it has been portrayed by some as a typical example of Bavarian baroque preaching from the later seventeenth century.1 More recently, his metaphorical approach to marriage has been commented upon in passing by Ulrike Strasser and Merry Wiesner-Hanks,2 whereas several culinary remarks in his sermons drew the attention of the late German gastrosopher Christoph Wagner, as can be read in the chapter on 'Barocke Lebensfreude im Spiegel österreichischer Barockpredigten' in his Universität der Genüsse, a modern encyclopedia of culinary taste.3 Beyond that, the sermons of Geminianus do not seem to have drawn much attention from specialists in Capuchin preaching. His works were probably overshadowed by the massive homiletic and poetic output of his near exact contemporary and fellow Capuchin friar, Prokopius Templinus. The latter's conversion to Catholicism, as well as his literary talents and his relatively well-documented preaching career made him from the outset a much more enticing figure.4 [End Page 171] Geminianus von Mainz was a member of the Capuchin Bavaria province. In between stints as guardian and provincial definitor, he was for a long time active as a preacher, both in various urban centers, in the Bavarian and Austrian countryside, and also at the court of Salzburg. Late in life, Geminianus published at least three volumes of Sun- and Feastday sermons, presented as the [Geistlicher] Weeg-Weiser gen Himmel ([Spiritual] road guide to Heaven). These volumes might be interpreted as the written harvest of his preaching career. The sermons they contain illustrate the type of rhetorical embellishment and shape of homiletic argument used by an experienced Capuchin friar from Southern Germany who tried to maintain a balance between Capuchin simplicity and 'baroque' embellishment: while he incorporated elements of what we have come to see as 'baroque preaching', he saw himself as standing in the Capuchin preaching tradition, adopting a preaching style that might have been less elaborate and more down to earth than that of some of his more famous German Capuchin contemporaries. The sermon on beer provided in a transcription and a draft translation at the end of this article offers a perfect example. Before discussing Germinianus' sermons, it is important, however, to understand how the Capuchins conceived preaching, pulled between their quest for simplicity and poverty on one hand, and the tendencies towards more intricate homiletic fashions from the later sixteenth century onwards on the other. Baroque preaching and the Capuchin homiletic tradition Seventeenth-century preaching is often associated with Baroque magnificence and the display of extravagant rhetorical prowess.5 It is also the period in which Capuchin preaching might have reached its peak, both in the number of preachers active on the ground, quite a few of whom became very renowned homiletic practitioners, and in the production of model sermon collections and other preaching aids.6 Yet the Capuchin [End Page 172] order from the outset had been keen to emphasize the importance of simple, evangelical preaching, in line with chapter nine of the Franciscan rule from 1223; Francis of Assisi and his early companions in that regard would have been the ultimate imitators of Christ and the Apostles. Hence, Capuchin legislation always stressed the importance of homiletic simplicity, sincerity, and brevity, suggesting that the promulgation of Christian truth should be imbued with the spirit of prayer and evangelical poverty, and that preaching should be the outward expression of the evangelical religious disposition of the preacher himself. Capuchin friars should preach as much through their example as through their words, and these words should reflect their life of evangelical poverty, humility and simplicity. These concerns are voiced in the oldest Capuchin Albacina ordinations from 1529,7 and they are more or less repeated with some variations in all subsequent Capuchin constitutions all the way up to 1643, when constitutions...